ARISS International Team TeleconferenceTuesday, 21 October 2014, 1215 UTC Participants: Larry Agabekov Oliver Amend Fabio Azzarello Barry Baines Kerry Banke Frank Bauer Gaston Bertels Bertus Hüsken David Jordan Keigo Komuro Ian MacFarquhar Lou McFadin Keith Pugh Kenneth Ransom Sergey Samburov Dave Taylor Stefan Wagener Rosalie White Interpreter: Mark LeybovichUnable to attend Graham Shirville Mark Steiner Darin Cowan Francesco De Paolis Tadeu Fernandes Christophe Mercier Ciaran Morgan Carlos Neta Ken Nichols Masanobu TsujiARISS-I Agenda: Roll Call—Rosalie White, K1STO Frank Bauer welcomed everyone and thanked them for ARISS activities they have done since our last meeting. 1. ARISS Officer Elections—Rosalie White, K1STO & Ian MacFarquhar, VE9IM Rosalie recounted that from the days of the first election of ARISS officers, the Canadian ARISS Delegates have graciously taken care of election logistics -- the announcement to Delegates requesting nominations, collecting these, asking nominees if they are willing to run, presenting the slate of names, setting a date for Delegates to submit votes, counting votes, and so on. Ian MacFarquhar is carrying on this tradition. Ian reported that he emailed Delegates about the call for nominations, and gave a due date of October 24 for receiving nominations. He has been sent several nominations, and the nominees have been contacted about their willingness to stand. Nominations are open until the 24th, and then Ian will send the list of nominations to be approved and seconded. Next he will forward the results to the Chair for action. Rosalie reminded Delegates again of the deadline (October 24) for submitting nominations to Ian. 2. Status on Updating ToR—Rosalie White, K1STO & Gaston Bertels, ON4WF Rosalie thanked Gaston Bertels for doing a masterful job of initially updating the ToR for us, and for continuing to revise it as Delegates have spotted other things to update. A thank you goes to Stefan Wagener for closely reviewing every aspect of the ToR and listing quite a number of suggested edits. A group of us will review all those suggestions and then make changes and present it to Delegates for a final review. Gaston thanked Keigo Komuro and Stefan for help with a number of the revisions. Thank you again, Gaston and all reviewers for your work. 3. New Point of Contact List Administrator—Dave Taylor, W8AAS Ham TV & CW Beacon—Gaston Bertels, ON4WF Rita Wright, KC9CD, had been doing the update to our very important Point of Contact list. When Rita became unable to continue, Dave Taylor stepped in temporarily to make the updates. Dave asked for volunteers who would take over, and Brian Jackson, VE6JBJ, an ARISS mentor, graciously offered to continue doing this important work. Please review your listing to ensure it is complete and accurate. If something needs to be changed, please contact Brian, whose email address is: bjackson@rockyview.ab.ca

4. Ham TV & CW Beacon—Gaston Bertels, ON4WF The Ham TV unit is onboard the ISS and is operational but not in use, due to waiting for the finalization of an agreement between ESA and ARISS. Gaston has sent a reminder again to ESA management and he is waiting for a response. Art Towslee has done nice work on the slide show unit and yesterday he sent photos to Gaston of his work, which Gaston has forwarded to Kaiser Italia (KI). The chief engineer at KI is doing the paperwork to submit to KI managers. 5. US Proposal Process Underway—Frank Bauer, KA3HDO The new US school proposal process is underway. The NASA Teaching From Space office had been handling the US proposal process, and when their funding support ended, the proposal process was taken over by American Radio Relay League and AMSAT-NA. The US team has worked aggressively to update the proposal process based on recent lessons learned, and to re-write the proposal guide and the forms. The window for submitting proposals has been opened, it will be open for 2 months, and it will close on 15 December. Information is on the ARISS web site. Schools will then be selected for the scheduling queue. 6. Update on Responses to Lou about WiFi Team—Lou McFadin, W5DID The WiFi team was set up to mitigate WiFi interference to our HamTV contacts. Lou McFadin and Kerry Banke are on the team. Last month, we asked if there were any ARISS volunteers who were interested in joining the committee. Lou reported that he has received no responses to his request for people to assist with working on developing a WiFi filter for HamTV ground stations. Both Lou and Kerry have found that a filter is essential to receive HamTV when WiFi signals are present. Lou hopes to find a commercial filter that can be re-tuned to meet our needs, but he has not had time to pursue this. Late-breaking topicsCongratulations to Gaston Bertels on the Roy Stevens, G2BVN, Memorial Trophy Frank extended the team’s congratulations to Gaston for the very prestigious Roy Stevens, G2BVN, Memorial Trophy, and said that Gaston is very deserving of it. Gaston gave a brief list of the roles he has played in IARU Region 1, which were the basis for the award. At Frank’s request, Gaston will write a few paragraphs about this information that we can post on the ARISS website.ISS Utilization Frank spoke briefly about the crew’s increasing workload. More experiments are being flown and the crew must work hard to take care of all of them. As a result, ARISS is having difficulty getting contacts scheduled. Recently, many contacts were unable to be scheduled in our planned weeks and were postponed, which makes later scheduling even more difficult. We will carefully watch the situation and may have to take steps to mitigate it. Kenneth commented that the problem will get worse before it improves.

Our next meeting is 18 November 2014 . *****Note: the time changes to 1215 UTC!!

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Amateur Radio on the International Space Station is a program that lets students experience the excitement of Amateur Radio by talking directly with crew members of the International Space Station. Learn More